In Episode 1 we explored the creation of legendary gun designer John M. Browning's first great invention, called the "Single Shot," by the Browning brothers (and also referred to by others as the Model 1878 single shot rifle).

Part of the agreement between Browning and T.G. Bennett, the General Manager of Winchester Repeating Arms for the firearm giant to produce Browning’s robust single shot rifle (soon to be renamed, once again, and known around the globe as the Winchester Model 1885) was for Mr. Browning to take a crack at creating a big-bore repeating rifle.

As - bit of background, in the early 1880s a seemingly unsolvable design problem faced America’s gun makers. The big-bore “Buffalo Rifle,” usually chambered in a massive straight-walled cartridge like the 45-70 Government, was limited to hefty single-shot breech-loading designs like the Browning, Sharps or the US military “Trapdoor” Springfield.

This was because the breech block lockup and linkage designs on the lever-actions of the era couldn’t handle either the massive back-thrust of these big cartridges when fired, nor were they long enough to reliably load and extract them from a tubular magazine. 

The initial presentation of the new rifle design to Mr. Bennett was important enough to John M. Browning that he and his brother Matt boarded a train in their hometown of Ogden, Utah Territory, bound for New York City and thence to the Winchester Repeating Arms factory in New Haven, Connecticut. 

The Browning brothers, neither of whom had ever traveled much beyond a day’s horseback ride from where they were born, spent a day in New York City seeing the sights. While there they gave a preview of the new rifle to one of their firearm industry colleagues. After carefully examining the rifle, he noted with some awe that he was holding the future of Winchester Repeating Arms in his hands.

The following day the Browning brothers showed the prototype to Mr. Bennett in New Haven. While the exact price Bennett paid for the Browning patent on the Model 1886 is lost to history, several reliable sources place it in the neighborhood of $50,000, literally a small fortune back then. In fact, it was, as John M. Browning once alluded, “…probably more money than there was in Ogden (Utah) at the time.” In today's dollars payment would be around $1.3 million dollars.

Today's Browning lever action is the BLR. At its core it continues to solve the problem that John Browning faced over 130 years ago. That is, building a rifle strong enough to handle powerful cartridges. BLRs come in both short and long actions and can handle everything up to the belted magnums. The BLR was introduced in 1971 and with its detachable box magazine, many hard-core lever shooters consider it the culmination of the lever action advantage.. READ MORE ABOUT THE BLR.